John Winters is a Massachusetts native who has spent more than a decade as a journalist and still contributes to select publications. His work has appeared in Salon, the Providence Phoenix, Runner's World, Playboy, The Patriot Ledger, Rhode Island
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John Winters is a Massachusetts native who has spent more than a decade as a journalist and still contributes to select publications. His work has appeared in Salon, the Providence Phoenix, Runner's World, Playboy, The Patriot Ledger, Rhode Island Monthly, Art New England, as well as daily papers across southeastern Massachusetts and various websites. His short stories have appeared in literary journals. He is the author of the novel, Murderhouse Blues, and the short story collection, Coulda Been Somebody. John is an adjunct faculty member at Bridgewater State University, where he teaches English.

Something about fall in suburbia makes me feel as if I’m caught up in a John Cheever story. Perhaps it’s the mix of beauty and melancholy I find in the season, I’m not sure. But the stories written by the Quincy seem pitch perfect for this time of year, with the warmth of summer fading and the realization that winter storms are not far off.

Thirty years ago, the sad but brilliant life of the “American Chekov,” as many have referred to him, came to an end.

I read “Falconer” as a young man and never forgot the stark portrait of prison life. Eventually I came upon Cheever’s real gift to American letters, his short stories – which earned him a Pulitzer and a National Book Award. The hard-edged reality and gin-soaked perspective make these stories unique in the canon of suburban fiction. The best, like “The Swimmer,” “The Enormous Radio,” “The Five-Forty-Eight” and “The Season of Divorce” capture so much about what life in mid-century America was like. Yet, they are timeless, full of characters real and surreal, situations both humorous and pathetic, and universal emotions. The prose itself is always bourbon smooth, a model of classicism with the occasional jewel of a metaphor or turn of phrase.

Blake Bailey’s excellent biography of Cheever will no doubt leave you sad more than anything else (Updike’s review of the book was that it was just too torturous to enjoy). However, it is a fascinating look into an author whose roots run deep in the local soil.

Before the biography came out, Cheever was another great author on my shelves. However, a few years ago I almost stumbled upon the man himself. Well, his grave, at least. My band was playing at a pub in downtown Rockland, Mass., and during a break on the back deck a local musician everyone affectionately called Dancin’ Bob due to his enthusiastically animated way with a mandolin and harmonica, pointed into the darkness that lay beyond the stonewall that marked the side of the bar’s parking lot.

“Did you know John Cheever is buried over there?” he said.

I almost fell over. It was too dark to go hunting for his grave that night, but I promised myself I would make it back during the daytime.

Recently, I went. And there it was, right there in First Parish Cemetery: the final resting place of a man whose life desperately needed a place to land. Tormented by alcoholism and his semi-closeted bisexuality, Cheever’s personal life was a tragedy partly of his own making. The stories in Bailey’s biography of his time “teaching” at Boston University will break your heart one moment and have you so frustrated you just may toss the book across the room the next. The benders, the disappointments, the marital strife and infidelities… Much of this, by the way, he also chronicled himself in his collected letters. That he turned all this into the kind of literature he produced is amazing.

His grave marker was small, like the physical stature of the man it commemorates. If it were scaled to his literary accomplishment it would dwarf the bar next door and half the neighborhood.

The stories are his triumph and the best way to remember John Cheever. The lives of writers are often messy, which is why we best keep not up on a pedestal, but up on the shelf, close at hand.